Author Archives: Rance

Woodlawn Background

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Located on the Chicago’s South Side, Woodlawn is a neighborhood with a rich cultural and historical legacy. Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” depicts the Younger Family struggling to break the walls of entrenched racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry based based the play on her family’s own personal and legal struggle to purchase a home in Washington Park, known then as West Woodlawn, in 1937. Woodlawn was a neighborhood where racial covenants would have legally prevented them from purchasing a home. Yet, by the premiere of the play in 1959, Woodlawn had essentially undergone the process of racial and socioeconomic upheaval (Taub, 1988).

Just across the Midway from the University of Chicago, Woodlawn has a strong legacy of community organizations such as The Woodlawn Organization (TWO). Unfortunately, it has become an unfortunate tragic tale of racial change in South Side Chicago. For several decades, much of Woodlawn has been plagued by social duress.

The recent push to improve smaller buildings in Woodlawn has grown out of efforts to redevelop Grove Parc. Grove Parc is one of the neighborhood’s affordable housing (Section 8) communities, notorious for its state of deterioration in recent years. Having grown out of the efforts to organize against University of Chicago’s Urban Renewal project, it has provided long-term affordable housing for low-income residents and an informal commitment from the University to forego expansion opportunities below 61st Street that is still in effect today. Grove Parc is the center of the Choice Neighborhoods revitalization initiative in Woodlawn.

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Introduction

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This thesis analyzes a range of market, policy, and neighborhood challenges associated with a particular housing typology—the two- to four-unit buildings in the Chicago neighborhood of Woodlawn—with the hope of developing a credible plan for contributing to the neighborhood’s health. This it accomplished through a descriptive case study of the real estate development process and supporting social ecosystem. The thesis then formulates a set of strategic options for stabilizing the local market, pursuing specific policy and community development improvements, expanding access to financial resources, improving technical and professional services for homeowners, and investing in a manner consistent with promoting improved circumstances for the widest swatch of neighborhood residents and stakeholders.

Smaller buildings in Chicago are a very important part of the housing stock, with two- to four-unit properties accounting for approximately one-third of the entire stock in Cook County (IHS, 2012a). In Woodlawn, the proportion of rental housing units in this building typology is slightly higher(IHS, 2012b). Much of this housing was negatively impacted by Great Recession, with 41% of the 2-4 buildings in Woodlawn having been impacted by foreclosure in 2005-2011(IHS, 2012a). Because of both their ubiquitous and dispersed presence in the neighborhood, these buildings are critical to the health of the neighborhood.

Since 2007, an exciting revitalization endeavor has been taking place in Woodlawn. As the lead grantee in the $30.5 million Woodlawn Choice Neighborhoods, non-profit developer Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), has undertaken an ambitious plan centered on redeveloping a large, distressed apartment complex in the center of the neighborhood. Under the Choice Neighborhoods initiative, POAH has been partnering with stakeholders to take on broader neighborhood-level improvements and formulate a Small Building Initiative since 2012. This research and planning endeavor is directly motivated by this Initiative, yet it intends to identify generalizable challenges, lessons, and insights that can be valuable to a range of neighborhood planners and actors.

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